As many around the world said to Americans in September 2001, we say to the men and women throughout Paris, France and Europe today: You are not alone. Our unity will ultimately triumph, and our cause will ultimately prevail.

It may seem as though all the famous writers have full-time writing jobs to which boost their chances of their novels selling and hitting the bookshelves. However, by looking through the authors etched in literary history, this is far from the case.

My generation gets a lot of flack for being self-involved, lazy, and socially-inept whiners, like Holden Caulfield. However, I would like to challenge the people making these claims to think about whether or not they felt certain when they made decisions that altered the rest of their lives.

Salinger's magic was in the observant way he used detail to make his characters come alive. On just a surface level, it never matters much what happens in a Salinger story, because it's such a pleasure simply of hanging around and listening to his people interact.

In the hands of a master like Salinger, spiritual dilemmas seem as perfectly suited to his characters as jealousy does to Shakespeare's Othello. Often denigrated as self-absorbed neurotics, they are undergoing upheavals and transformations that spiritual aspirants identify with.

After all the hype about its supposedly mind-blowing revelations about the late J.D. Salinger, Shane Salerno's Salinger turns out to be a hype -- an overblown, overlong documentary with little that is either truly revelatory or earth-shaking.